


Spirit Healing

by daggerpen



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Gen, solitary confinement allusions, starvation allusions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-15
Updated: 2015-05-15
Packaged: 2018-03-30 16:38:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 811
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3943915
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/daggerpen/pseuds/daggerpen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cole meets Anders.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Spirit Healing

He remembers the dark.

Cold, creeping, crushing, cascades of unfamiliar sensations, of the sharp stabs of knives in his gut and thoughts dancing before his eyes, and they are not real but they are realer than anything he has ever known.

The world is quiet and solid, and he is the boy everyone forgot and he is the boy who cast off his name with his father and he is Compassion and he is-

He jerks, judders, Justice flooding his mind, familiar unfamiliar Fade in the spirits who are more, and he is cast out, cut off.

"Wh- what are you doing?" A quaver in his voice, quiver in his shoulders. His knuckles white on his staff, Freedom's Call. He met Freedom once, many of them, flitting flutters in the Fade across time that could not be measured, but they could never stay. His hand copies the gesture, and he is Cole and he is Compassion and it is Anders who stands before him, and it is Justice.

"What you're doing, it's-" Anders cannot find the words, and Justice is no better equipped. He is bright inside. Cole can feel the tentative brush of Justice against him, mirroring his movements like ripples in water, not quite the same, because Justice is not always Compassion and Compassion is not always Justice and they are two not-quite-spirits with pieces of people inside. But Cole can feel the pain, tangles and snarls and wounds the healer cannot close.

Before he was Cole, before he was real, in the mudded mists of memory he remembers the magic. He would peek across the Veil, drawn by blood and pain and the soothing supplications of spells, and he would pour himself in until either it was right or the healer could not hold. He can see this too through the edges of Justice, feel the magic in his hands that him-Cole cannot match and Cole is sad that this, too, has pain.

He is different now, and the boy who is neither spirit nor real cannot fix flesh anymore. But he couldn't mend minds before, either, and he thinks that this is all right.

"You're not human." Justice tells Anders this in the part that is both, waves of feelings where words wilt and weaken. They miss each other, and Justice resents the intrusion. "You're not- you're not a demon."

"I think I was," Cole says to Justice. "I don't think you ever were. We are both more now." He feels Justice twist away, try to brighten until Cole is blind with the Fade. "It's okay," he says to Anders. "I want to help."

Justice is not Compassion and Compassion is not Justice and this world is real and complicated and uncertain.

"It's okay that it changed you," he says to them both. "People change. Varric taught me that." He pauses. "He's angry, but he's still your friend."

Anders jerks back, and his face twists with his stomach. Cole is still learning to work with that part, where inside and outside are different but one shapes the other.

Justice rears, bringing fragments of Fade to Anders' face. They think he is prying, but even though Cole is more now he cannot be more than he is.

"Why do you want to keep hurting?" Cole asks.

' _Justice is an idea. It makes sense in a world of ideas, but not in our world._ ' She should be wrong. Some things are certain, concrete, but Kristoff's wife runs from him and he does not know how to make it right. Anders thinks that it is not the same thing, which it is and it isn't, and it confuses all of them.

Cole cannot feel their pain now. It is connected but they are dead, done, departed somewhere none of them know. There is the pain of the refugees, the wastes of war, but the connection is fragile, frail spiderwebs fanned across him and Fiona and Cullen and miles and years, templars and mages and the Chantry, and the weight of the war cannot be Anders' alone. But, bright and bitter, there is the pain of the survivors, of Anders' friends, of doubt and betrayal.

Cole can feel all their pain, and it does not contradict. He is Cole, but he is Compassion, too, and it does not snarl at him. But Justice does not know what to do with wrong for wrong to realize right, and he is stuck like Anders in the dark.

"You don't have to hurt to heal it," Cole tells them both. "You can fix it and forgive yourself."

"... I don't know how," Anders says, and then he and Justice are quiet.

Cole remembers still, the pull of the Veil and being pulled across and the partners of mage and compassion bringing succor to the sick.

"That's okay," Cole tells them both. "We're good at healing."

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[podfic] Spirit Healing](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4599456) by [Kess](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kess/pseuds/Kess)




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